Behind the scenes of Creating Movie Magic

How a 13-year-old and Oscar-winners Aardman came together to create this cinematic short film.

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Not many 13-year-olds can say they've created a film with an Oscar-winning studio – but Hannah Mason can. The teenager from Wiltshire in the UK had her storyboard selected to be turned into a short movie by Aardman Animations, in order to promote legitimate ways of downloading and watching films to children.

"There were loads of brilliant entries all with different creative ways to talk about respecting film copyright," says Lucy Izzard, the film's director and character designer. "But we could only choose one winning storyboard, and Hannah's was the one that made us laugh, and was most 'on point.'"

With the winning entry selected, it was up to Lucy and her team to move things forward. Despite the young age of the film's creative force, they treated it just like any other project.

"Hannah came into the Aardman studio with about 10 of her friends and we had a board meeting like we would with any commercial client," she says.

"It was great – we showed them our animatic and initial ideas for the character and background designs, discussed ideas with the development of the script and storyboard."

Behind the scenes of Creating Movie Magic

Aardman may be primarily known known for stop motion adventures such as Chicken Run and The Pirates!, but it branches out into 2D and CG animation methods too. There was a natural choice for Lucy when it came to Creating Movie Magic.

"We could do anything we wanted with the look of the film," she says. "However for the time, budget and my style of character design, 2D animation in Flash was the perfect answer."

The finished 30-second film will be shown at the Into Film Festival, a free national event for young people aged between five and 19 – which means it has a potential audience of hundreds of thousands.

"It's quite tricky to get the message of copyright and IP protection right in only 35 seconds of animation," says Lucy. "But I think we did it – all with the help of that zombie!"